Kuwait GIS, handhelds tank, sign away!

MS ditches Yahoo! Search in favor of it’s own new Search engine. The search engine available from the MSN homepage targets rivals Yahoo! and Google for the sought after Search Engine market. Of course, they are also planning a desktop search utility… sorry, but I’m not about to install anyone’s utility that crawls my local documents and email! Information Week covered this news nicely

Kuwait?

I see the Kuwait GIS conference is scheduled to kick off this week… rather odd given the political climate over there… I think I’ll pass on this one! More info at http://www.gulfgis.com/

Greg Norman promotes GPS

Greg Norman, drew a large crowd to GPSI’s news conference at the PGA merchandise show last Thursday afternoon, where he discussed his involvement with GPSI and the future of its Wi-Fi and GPS business solutions. GPSI develops and markets GPS and Wi-Fi wireless multimedia solutions

Handhelds on the slide

According to IDC’s Worldwide Handheld QView, device shipments increased 37.4% sequentially but fell 18.7% year-over-year in 4Q04 to 2.8 million units. For the full year 2004, worldwide handheld device shipments reached 9.2 million units, a decrease of 13% over 2003’s shipments of 10.6 million units. Palm still dominates the market (42%) with HP second at about 27% mkt share. The decline is no doubt due to the uptake of smartphones with larger screen sizes, loads of memory, and enhanced capabilities like messaging, video, GPS, and audio.

Sign on the dotted line

Well I did it again against my better judgement. I signed a 2 year contract with a communication provider. This time it was for satellite TV (Bell Canada). These contracts pi#$@#$ me off to no end, particlarly since my experience with Bell Mobility to date has been a total cluster. We’ll see if this comes back to haunt me in the future. On the upside, my cellphone contract is almost scheduled to lapse I can soon switch to a pay as you go monthly deal from Rogers Wireless.. I highly recommend this to anyone in Canada. My tip of the day… here in canada, RBC Visa card holders can setup a toll free number and awesome calling plan that costs peanuts. Your business can provide customers with a toll free number to use and you can call in when on the road negating those huge roaming charges and long distance bills you typical get when your on the road. See keyword Talk & Save.

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